The Gulf Cooperation Council, with Saudi Arabia a key member, has already agreed that Gaddafi’s government is illegitimate and support’s a no-fly zone. If Saudi Arabia can convince Egypt to join in, then two of the best equipped air forces in the Arab/North African world could ground Gaddafi’s fearsome air-force.

The Arab community must be the one to front and support any foreign intervention in Libya, or else the neocolonial arguments will just fracture the country more and send waving nationalists over to Gaddafi’s side.

Voting has just begun in a week-long referendum amongst Southern Sudanese, on whether or not they should leave Sudan and go it alone.

Following decades of violence, it’s hard to see how the people of Southern Sudan will not vote for independence. As the deserts of the north make way for grasslands, forests and swamps of the south, the people change as drastically as the landscape. The predominately Arabic-speaking Muslim northerners are totally different from the tribal Christian or Animist southerners. In the north, 50% or more of children complete primary school, whereas this figure drops to closer to 1% in parts of the South. Infant mortality nearly doubles if you travel between Khartoum and Juba, capitals of each part of Sudan. Over 2/3rds of people in the northern Khartoum, River Nile and Gezira states have access to piped drinking water or pit latrines, as opposed to under 20% of southerners without any form of toilet.

Recently, David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy signed a pair of treaties ensuring British and French military cooperation, perhaps for the next 50 years. It means sharing command of a Combined Joint Expeditionary Force, aircraft carriers, research and equipment. This has pretty met with vitriol in the British tabloids…but this step doesn’t limit our capabilities, it enhances them.

In order to maintain even a hint of independent military capability, ironically, we must cooperate with others. If we can, we need to take every opportunity to spread costs – cooperation over nuclear weapons research (especially if, like these, it involves no explosions and no transfer of any British, or American, secrets), joint-training policies, sharing transport planes and the like all mean that we will hopefully have more money to spend on actually training, paying and equipping soldiers, buying planes, tanks, ships and drones, and deploying our military capabilities overseas. If we even want to deploy unilaterally.

Try going for a day without the internet. Try not being able to IM friends, post on Facebook, update your twitter, do research for essays, search for a job, read this excellent blog, transfer money between bank accounts, get hold of vital government services, and more. Not easy, is it?

Yes, the internet is important to daily life. It’s also vital to our security. As Iran is currently finding out. Welcome Iran, to the world of cyberwarfare.